Comments on: you keep using that word

By: ERose

ERose — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:08:12 +0000

@Daniel – I don’t mean to pick on you, but you aren’t delusional so much as, yeah, privileged.
The whole concept of privilege is built on the idea that your whiteness or your maleness means you automatically avoid issues people who don’t share them face all the time. You avoid them so completely, you aren’t even aware they happen.
How much of your day in high school – or even now – is spent wondering if your outfit will be considered grounds for dismissing your work? How often do you contend with opinions of your gender formed solely on the fact that your boss or colleague had bad luck with men socially in high school? How often do you have to deal with an HR director’s opinions about “what men are like” that really have nothing to do with what -you – are like? How often do you deal with someone completely disrespecting your professional time by trying to hit on you while you’re trying to program? And not understanding why you’re upset, even blaming you for it, if you ask them to stop? How often does anything you say get considered an example of the way all men deal with a given situation?
Or even consider this – the fact that you feel ill-used because you didn’t have influence or female attention in high school indicates that you felt those were things you were entitled to have. The right to influence is assumed by very few people in our society and many of them are white men. Feeling cheated because you aren’t on top absolutely implies that you, and people who look like you, take that status for granted. That is indeed a privilege.

By: Against Meritocracy « Feminist Philosophers

Against Meritocracy « Feminist Philosophers — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:33:57 +0000

[...] Feminism has a guest post entitled, “you keep using that word”, which argues, “…a meritocracy is not [...]

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:02:17 +0000

The word “meritocracy” comes from political satire. The word “silly” used to mean “blessed”. The word “idiot” used to mean “private citizen”. “Impressionist” was originally an insult. A word’s origins don’t necessarily have much to do with how it’s later used, and “meritocracy” seems to be mainly used today as referring to a system where people are assigned positions and responsibilities relative to their skill and abilities, which seems to me like something worth aspiring to, even if “merit” is slightly subjective, and even if we’ll never get all the way there.

I’ve never seen anyone claim that today’s job market (or the IT world) is a perfect meritocracy. On the other hand, I did spend my (early 90′s) highschool years with a bunch of hacker types (100% male, but ethnically diverse), and I do believe that it was a meritocracy of sorts. By that I don’t mean that women would have been worse at programming, just that the rest of high school was a popularity contest, while among the hackers, you got respect for programming something fun or clever – that was the only metric that mattered. Frankly, the only people who spent time around computers were the outcasts – the ugly and the socially incompetent – and hacking was a way for the losers to get at least some recognition, even if it was from other losers.

I honestly believe that if any girls had deigned to try out the low-status hobby of programming, they would also have been judged by their programming abilities. Now, I understand that they faced additional obstacles in *entering* the meritocracy, because society had, idiotically, determined that computers were a “guy thing”, and it can be daunting to be the only girl(s) in a male-dominated environment, so people in general would have seen them as weird. Although mostly they would have been seen as weird for voluntarily spending time in a group that was on the popularity level of hobos.

As one of the guys, I don’t really see what I could have done to welcome girls into the group. Hackers weren’t in a position to make hacking more popular for girls – hackers were the ones with the LEAST social influence. They were unpopular, powerless, and seen as a joke by the rest of the school. We certainly didn’t want to keep girls out – we were acutely aware that no girls wanted to spend any time with us or doing what we loved. Of course, I’ve had the luck of being born in a first-world country, but still I have a hard time seeing the ugly, unpopular, depressed teenager I was as “the most privileged of the privileged”.

Am I deluded in some way?

By: you keep using that word | Geek Feminism Blog

you keep using that word | Geek Feminism Blog — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:30:54 +0000

[...] is a guest post by Garann Means. This post originally appeared on her [...]

By: casey

casey — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:59:15 +0000

The NBA is a great example of the sham of the meritocracy, as well as how it’s a much more damaging lie in the geek world than in general society.

I’m sure the white American guys who were playing in the 40′s and 50′s thought they were playing in a meritocracy.

And I’m sure the black and white American guys playing in the 60′s-80′s thought they were the best and were playing in a meritocracy.

Nowadays a huge percent of the league’s best players are foreign-born. There are Latino and Asian guys who are elite players, an idea that probably would’ve got you laughed at 20 years ago.

They probably think they’re playing in a meritocracy, too. Which is silly, because there are still billions of people around the world who have never even heard of basketball.

The difference between geeks and pro athletes is that athletes aren’t nearly as scared of a little competition. And even if they were, the fans just want the best product. Geeks don’t have fans. We can do whatever jerkfaced things we want to keep the talent pool from getting bigger, and hardly any non-geek is in a position to call BS on it.

By: garann

garann — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:35:09 +0000

@Alex – You are one of my very favorite people in this community and I *do* know how dedicated you are – you personally in addition to all the guys like you who I have not acknowledged here – to creating more diversity. I don’t mean to yell at white men, I mean to yell about them. About what they represent in terms of truly locating merit, not about them having an innate lack of merit. But I do mean to yell. You can only be told by so many white, male community leaders, “The best will rise up and make themselves known through their hard work and sacrifice, just like I did!” before the staggering number of biases and assumptions you’d have to politely debate, were you to try, just make you lose your fucking shit and yelling seems exactly as useful.

By: Alex Sexton

Alex Sexton — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:07:11 +0000

I agree that we’re far from a merit or skill based system, but the solution is to build up the underrepresented, and educate those that are currently overrepresented and encourage them to help make things right.

At the risk of painting a very backwards picture (read the whole paragraph), many of these posts come off very negatively towards middle-classed privileged white males (such as myself) and therefor don’t necessarily help move the ball forward (because most will just ignore them). I’m not saying that I’m somehow persecuted or hurt or even effected (fairly or unfairly) in _any way_ by this, I’m just saying that it’s not helping move the ball forward, which hurts the groups that we’re trying to help.

“You are lazier than you think you are and you aren’t as good as you think at what you claim to be passionate about” … “now please do this thing I’m asking” is a hard sell. (negative reinforcement doesn’t work on dogs…)

I hope you know I’m dedicated to getting things into a respectable state, and I want to help be a driver of that change. I think you’ll find that a huge set of privileged white male developers also want to help effect change. Yelling at them for not denying the care or education or gifts that their rich white parents gave to them is not going to help get them involved and proactive in helping even things out (and, again, it doesn’t hurt them in any way either).

I totally agree that programming is an _easy_ path for privileged white males, but it seems like you’re advocating for making it harder for them, rather than easier for everyone else. There is certainly no lack of demand for good developers. On behalf of the mediocre privileged white dudes, most of us would be happy to help make sure that the opportunities that were handed to us could also be handed to people who are different than us.

I’m sure I _am_ ignorant about a lot of this stuff, but I know that I am not _intentionally_ requesting sameness in my environment. I think a vast majority of privileged white dude programmers would whole-heartedly agree. That means it’s up to education and action to actively revert the sins of the past and point out the sins of the present with everyone’s help. We didn’t start the fire, but we took advantage of it (should we have not?). But we’re extremely willing to help spread the fire to anybody, and I think that is what we should write blog posts about and tweet about instead of placing blame on people who are taking opportunities that are available to them (that’s the whole point!).

(I’m sure there are a million things to pick apart in that comment, but just keep my intent in mind when pointing out all of the flaws, which is to make things better)

By: Tobias Wright

Tobias Wright — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:49:44 +0000

Brilliant. I’ve been saying forever that you can only maybe have meritocracy in a homogeneous environment. Thank you.

By: Jens Ayton

Jens Ayton — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:54:29 +0000

The word “meritocracy” may be from the fifties, but the concept is of course much older. Notably, Plato considered “rule by the best”, or “aristocracy”, to be the most desirable form of government.

Oddly enough, when we tried it in practice we ended up with a small clique of white guys whose power bore no obvious relationship to their excellence at all. Whoda thunk it?

By: Andreas Fuchs

Andreas Fuchs — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:50:23 +0000

This is such a great post, thanks so much for writing it. Made my day (-: